The New York Review of Books

Our 11/5 issue is now online, with Sue Halpern on fascist dorks, Colm Tóibín on La Bola Negra, @juliangewirtz.bsky.social on AI supremacists, Susan Tallman on Vermeer, @around.com on duplicitous chatbots, Adam Thirlwell on Wallace Shawn’s genius, and much more.

“Multinational corporations...vex the [novel] form,” Daisy Hildyard writes. “Taking them seriously...might alter our understanding of what a nation is and how people relate to another in it. It would also be a practical nightmare for the novelist.”

Jonathan Guyer on how the Blob went MAGA

Today at 1:00 PM EDT join Ben Rhodes (rhodesben.bsky.social), Astra Taylor (astra.bsky.social), and Fintan O'Toole (fotoole.bsky.social) for the first of a two-part online series on the midterm elections. Register at: https://go.nybooks.com/4e0TrZT

“It took the deaths of three of their own to shock the Weather Underground into realizing just what a bomb could do. Ironically, the townhouse accident garnered far more publicity than any of the group’s subsequent bombings.” —Adam Hochschild

“Given the number of Black voters in Mississippi, it will not be easy for the Republican state legislators to gerrymander every one of their districts into oblivion, but the party is clearly going to try.” —Jeffrey Toobin

“Trump’s maximally permissive attitude toward the Saudis revealed a deeper truth...US policymakers have never put concern for real Yemenis at the center of their decision-making.” —Nicolas Niarchos

“Their search for freedom offers the film a tone that is glittering and flippant. The dark knowledge of what happened in the civil war is left throbbing in the background.” www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“The threat of deportation,” writes Alice Driver, “makes undocumented minors in the workforce more afraid than ever to report abuses.”

So great to read this terrific piece by @ninasparling.bsky.social about David Morales in @nybooks.com online - couldn't be more different than the corrupt thug "Buddy" Cianci who was mayor during my time in #Providence. www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

Next Wednesday, join Daniel Mendelsohn for a three-part seminar on unrequited love in #JaneAusten’s Persuasion. Sign up at: https://go.nybooks.com/47FE9WY

“Wallace Shawn’s characters have become more and more adept—stunningly casual in their ability to make explicit what is usually never explicit, with an unbearable clarity about hidden motives.” —Adam Thirlwell

Amur tigers are “so elusive that even humans living in their territory may go all their lives without glimpsing more than a trail of pugmarks in the snow.” —Colin Thubron

“When it comes down to it,” Silicon Valley has “always been motivated by the desire to amass as much money as possible; democracy is just an impediment.” —Sue Halpern

“If Thomas Bernhard perfected, in his novels, the obsessive redundancy of human consciousness, Claire-Louise Bennett captures this circularity at its most comically banal.” —Meghan O’Gieblyn

On Tuesday, join Ben Rhodes (rhodesben.bsky.social), Astra Taylor (astra.bsky.social), and Fintan O’Toole (fotoole.bsky.social) for the first of a two-part online series on the midterm elections. Registration is pay-what-you-wish and open to the public. https://go.nybooks.com/4e0TrZT

“The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is perhaps the greatest chronicler of that era of scale, which stretched across the long twentieth century and only now shows the first signs of receding.” —@billmckibben.bsky.social

“New York City, as photographed by Baldwin Lee in the latter half of the 1970s, looks as immemorially still as cities do in photographs made over a century earlier.” —Joel Smit

“The easy pleasure of [Emily Mae Smith’s] fantastical scenes may get you in the door, but the real point is in the way they’re rendered—the depth, the tones, the shimmer.” —Will Heinrich

A century apart, socialists in America struggle to answer the same question: “How can working Americans be persuaded to express solidarity with their fellow toilers in the US and around the world?” —Michael Kazin

“Making China’s irreversible subordination the goal [of American-led AI regulations] gives Beijing every reason to suspect that any offer of restraint is a demand for surrender.” —Julian Gewirtz

“The siege is now the lengthiest in modern history: more than twenty times longer than Stalingrad’s, three times longer than Sarajevo’s, longer than even the siege of Troy by more than a year.” —Nicolas Niarchos

“Signally missing from these portraits of George Sand, the biographies as well as the biopics, is much sense of her significance as one of the most critically influential and commercially successful writers of the nineteenth century.” —Kathryn Hughes

Colin Thubron on the vanishing great cats

Adam Thirlwell on Wallace Shawn’s guilty pleasures

“The magic of Vermeer resides in the paintings—their peculiar way of being at once sociable and silent, of making the fall of light feel both transcendent and palpable.” —Susan Tallman

“The stories aren’t meant merely as excuses to relive that heady moment or as exercises in historical revisionism but rather as new vantage points from which to see our post–cold war world.” —Ian Johnson on a play about 1989 around the world

La Bola Negra is “hardly what we expect in a film about the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. It says more, perhaps, about the period in which it was made than it does about the past.” —Colm Tóibín

“The rollback of child labor protections in Arkansas,” writes Alice Driver, “reflected a broader, increasingly politicized national campaign to...redefine the limits of hazardous and dangerous work for children.”

“The apocalyptic warnings [about AI] may be another form of hype, a distraction from social and psychological harms that are more subtle, more insidious, and already here.” —@around.com

“The coup de grâce” for the Voting Rights Act’s opponents “came earlier this year, when the Court decided Callais, which made Chief Justice John Roberts’s memos from the early 1980s the law of the land.” —Jeffrey Toobin

Fintan O’Toole (@fotoole.bsky.social) on Andy Burnham’s efforts to unite the United Kingdom

Fintan O’Toole (@fotoole.bsky.social) on Andy Burnham’s efforts to unite the United Kingdom

“Is it ideologically inconsistent that companies led by men who excoriate the federal government...are being enriched by our tax dollars through generous government contracts? It is not.” —Sue Halpern

If American socialists “hope to gain a hearing from ordinary Americans, they should endorse the freedom to dispute [socialism’s] benefits and to seek to replace the institutions of their future order as well.” —Michael Kazin

“The [Tesco] warehouse is the heart of darkness of Leslie’s novel: a dreamlike place of horror that is generally unseen, not despite but because of its centrality to society’s everyday evils.” —Daisy Hildyard

“It may seem obvious that the civil war is still a haunting presence in Spain, but that is only partly true.... For some, it is hardly worth thinking about. La Bola Negra is caught between these two versions of the past.” —Colm Tóibín

“You could say doing criticism is getting better at noticing what you notice. Then you work backward from the effects, seeking their causes.” —an interview with Lola Seaton

“Dovzhenko—subject of “Earth and Empire,” a new retrospective at Metrograph—is Ukraine’s most famous director, but he’s a complicated hero for a Ukraine at war with Russia.” —Sophie Pinkham

Joel Smith on Baldwin Lee at Howard Greenberg Gallery https://go.nybooks.com/3Ucgeet

“The more I read the more I find reading to be a very complex activity, not straightforward or natural at all.” —an interview with Lola Seaton https://go.nybooks.com/4BoSqFa

For our latest episode of Private Life, Elaine Blair joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about Lena Dunham, sex, and television.

For our latest episode of Private Life, Elaine Blair joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about Lena Dunham, sex, and television. https://go.nybooks.com/4zOJuHv

Kathryn Hughes on the many lives of George Sand https://go.nybooks.com/4k6iP4b

“Conversation is our best tool of seduction. Computers did not arrive at a conversational style on their own.” —@around.com

Bill McKibben (billmckibben.bsky.social) on how Edward Burtynsky gets the big picture https://go.nybooks.com/4eqbadn

“The problem that the Weather Underground never faced...is that, despite its origins, for better or worse the United States is a profoundly unrevolutionary country.” —Adam Hochschild https://go.nybooks.com/4yX1rU5

Claire-Louise Bennett’s novels “capture the experience of consciousness more acutely than practically any other contemporary writer.” —Meghan O’Gieblyn